Crossfire cards running too loud and hot, need cooling advice!

Rimfire · 27 May 2011 at 16:22

Hi guys,

I recently installed a sapphire 5850 extreme in my pc alongside my HIS 5850 turbo and I'm having real problems keeping things cool and quiet! I installed two apache 120mm fans in my case, one on top and another to blow over the cards, but my side fan does not seem to spin round particularly quickly at all! in fact, most of the time it just kind of sits and twitches, and only spins at about 250 rpm during gaming! As a result, my top card hits about 80c during gaming and the fans get up to 70% which is too loud for me really.

My mobo is a Gigabyte GA-x58 UD3R and the case is a Coolermaster cm 690ii.
because of the orientation of the case and the position of the mobo and psu I cant use the lowest PCI express slot so the cards are less than 1cm apart which sucks. Short of buying a new case or mobo, which I cant justify, how can I sort out the cooling, either by increasing the side fan speed via software/BIOS or reorienting the fans/ adding fans and maintain a cool gpu? Am i stuffed? or will I have to bite the bullet and buy a fan controller, or will that not even sort it?

Any help is always appreciated, I've even drawn a daiagram to show my appreciation!lol!

http://i161.photobucket.com/albums/t206/alexvann/daigram2.jpg

http://i161.photobucket.com/albums/t206/alexvann/diagram1.jpg

1Day · 27 May 2011 at 16:54

The side fan connector, if you have the option to do so I would suggest do not use a 4 pin connector. Depending how you connect the two/three pin connector you can have the fan spin 100% all the time.

OLDPHART · 27 May 2011 at 16:57

Hi, check your Bios for fan settings > your side fan or try it in another header or you could mount a 120mm behind your GPU's which would blow cool air over them both bringing your temps down.

Rimfire · 27 May 2011 at 17:10

1Day said:
The side fan connector, if you have the option to do so I would suggest do not use a 4 pin connector. Depending how you connect the two/three pin connector you can have the fan spin 100% all the time.

I've connected the fan to a 3 pin connector as it's the only one that will reach, It's notched so I can only fit it on one way as well it seems :confused:

I dont think i'd want it spinning 100% all the time if it was really loud anyway, but it'd be good if I could control the fan via speedfan, but unfortunately it won't allow me to change it that way either!

OLDPHART said:
Hi, check your Bios for fan settings > your side fan or try it in another header or you could mount a 120mm behind your GPU's which would blow cool air over them both bringing your temps down.

I checked my BIOS settings for fan speed and only my cpu fan came up as being controllable, do you think a BIOS update would allow me to alter more fan speed settings as I think im running a fairly old (9 month old) BIOS? Could go for another fan i suppose but it would be just as easy to use a fan controller to change the side fan speed i guess. Looks like maybe that might be my only option!

Thanks for the help so far though guys!